The effects of explicit pronunciation instruction on adult German L2 learners’ comprehensibility

Abstract

This thesis investigated the effects of explicit pronunciation instruction on the Comprehensibility of adult L2 learners of German. Based on previous research in pronunciation instruction, I predicted that when given sufficient time (30 minutes per session), students who received explicit pronunciation instruction would achieve higher levels of comprehensibility compared to a control group. The participants included seven students across two universities. All students were in their second semester of an introduction to German course. Four of the seven students received four sessions of explicit pronunciation instruction, with a focus on three pronunciation features of German (word stress, allophones of German /ʁ/, final devoicing). After the sessions, all participants then completed a post-test. In the post-test, students read words and sentences, and also responded to questions. Two German speakers listened to audio recordings of the post-tests, and rated the comprehensibility of the participants on a Likert scale from one to five. The results indicate that while the comprehensibility of the control group worsened as tasks became more demanding, the explicit group maintained their level of Comprehensibility across tasks. This suggests the explicit group was able to generalize the features they had learned across tasks. These findings have implications for teaching pronunciation in the adult German classroom at a beginner level.